Friday 6 November 2009, 12:30 PM
V-Blocks - do they mean you're V-Locked in?
V-Blocks: it's a new form of packaging for servers, switches and storage for your datacentre, and it looks like the future.
EMC and Cisco have announced that they'll be selling aggregated systems that simply slot into your datacentre. Or 'private cloud', in today's shiny new, updated nomenclature.
Inside the black box will go all the complexity you currently have to manage separately, and the glue to bind them together comes from VMware. It seems like a unique concept, for while Sun tried selling a datacentre in a box and got some traction, this is a different kettle of fish, on a different scale (sorry).
Only HP, with its just-launched Converged Infrastructure concept is anywhere close to this, it seems. The aims of both are similar: to virtualise the hardware and provide a single view of the infrastructure that takes care of the messy details of what VM runs where, what's connected to what, and how. All you need to concern yourself with is the energy bill, security, and general management.
This is the new battleground. Other players are fighting back, including Dell, whose deal with Juniper Networks will allow its resurgent services division to sell combined packages. And IBM has a cloud of products, but it's unclear as yet how well they fit into this new paradigm.
Of course, what this means is that, if you're not in the box, you're locked out. If you're buying, do you care? It's somewhat analogous to the blade server chassis market. There's little commonality and so much vendor lock-in there too, but it's not an issue for most enterprises. And this is a much bigger play which, if successful, promises to bring riches to the pockets of vendors inside the tent.
Will those outside might spend some time getting wet, and find themselves searching for a V-Brolly?
Monday 2 November 2009, 8:30 AM
Adobe Reader in the Enterprise
This week I had the pleasure of working with some of the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers (PFE's) in an effort to further understand some of the application compatibility issues that might occur when sequencing for Microsoft App-V (formerly SoftGrid).
Quickly, the topic turned to compatibility issues surrounding Folder Redirection as this appeared to pose a serious compatibility problem for Adobe.
A quick scan of the web, raised a number of forum posting where numerous IT personnel could not get Acrobat or Reader 9 deployed to C# debugging and "file not found" issues.
For a few samples look here:
http://thinmaillist.blogspot.com/2008/08/thin-re-watch-out-with-adobe-acrobat_9472.html
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b5c03a
It looks like there were some pretty drastic solution paths explored here, especially for Citrix deployments. Yikes... I am really glad that I don't have to do this stuff anymore...
Before I dive too deep into the Adobe deployment problems, let's have a little introduction to Microsoft's Folder Redirection .
The idea of re-directing user local data folders onto the network was introduced with Windows XP and is defined as, "the automated re-routing of I/O (operations) from local standard folders to use a different, storage elsewhere on the network". Translated, this means that some standard user folders (i.e. My Pictures, My Documents) are redirected to store your files on a network server. This greatly increases the chances that your files (and Pictures) will get backed up in the laptop being nicked or knackered.
Windows Vista uses folder re-direction on the following directories; Contacts, Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites, Music, Videos, Pictures, Searches, AppData, Links, Saved Games.
If your browser has a spell checker AppData would appear with a red underline, which is appropriate as the AppData folder is one which caused us and to my great surprise, Adobe quite a lot of trouble.
Through our trouble-shooting exercise it became Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 were attempting to write user specific data to the AppData folder. This is fine and according to the Microsoft logo application development specifications, this is OK.
So, in an enterprise environment, a user will logon to their desktop or laptop and if their IT department has done their job, the AppData folder will be redirected to something like; \\servername\region\department\username\AppData
And, here is the big issue. As folder re-direction takes place prior to logon- the user will not have any mapped drives. So, the fully qualified path to the final resting place on the target server for AppData will be a UNC path.
Hint: It will be a UNC path.
As you can probably guess where I am going here;
Adobe Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader can not store their AppData files onto a UNC path. After a little debugging through their code, it appears that there is a failure to "read from left to right" and correctly parse the full path.
Hence, the file not found, app crashes and C# debugger errors that present themselves to users upon application start-up.
So, I did little more digging and loading Flash and version 6,7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. All of these packages use the redirected folder "AppData" in the same way - and I am sure that they will experience the same issue.
I will write more on the Adobe issues in forthcoming posts. And, there will be plenty to write about as it looks like there are over 400 application level conflicts between Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9.
References:
Folder Redirection has a brief mention here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folder_redirection
Thursday 29 October 2009, 12:30 PM
What Microsoft understands about virtualisation (and a problem for VMware)
When VMware’s main competition was a little company called Connectix (100 people to VMware’s 200), the two virtualisation teams were best enemies; staring each other down, going head to head and planning to crush the opposition and own the market.
When Microsoft bought Connectix and worked through the tortuous internal steps to get to a sensible virtualisation plan, switching from head-on competition to telling VMware what they were doing so everyone could plan ahead on the management tools front was a bit of a shock; when we caught up with him in Redmond recently Ben Armstrong (the Virtual PC Guy) told us he basically had to pinch himself at the first meeting.
Why did it make sense for Microsoft to do this, above and beyond being so big that it has to bend over backwards to be (and be seen to be) fair? It’s because to Microsoft virtualisation isn’t a product; it’s a feature. Just as Windows phones are Windows phones because they’re part of the overall Windows platform, virtualisation is a Windows feature more than it’s a platform in its own right. (This approach has some unexpected benefits, as Ben recently found; if you plug a UPC into a Windows Server but don’t configure the USB/serial port failover software, your VMs are still protected. The server notices it’s running on a machine with a battery and uses the default power management settings; when the UPS battery starts running low, it will shut itself down gracefully – and by default the Hyper-V virtual machines will be saved, ready to restart automatically when you power the server back up.)
I've been saying for a while that most virtualisation projects currently are strategic; I should probably say tactical because I mean that they’re specific projects virtualising a specific thing for a specific benefit. Virtualisation is a deliberate tactic or strategy for that project rather than the default approach. When the management tools are sufficiently mature and migration doesn’t mean choosing between buying identical hardware to migrate to or reducing your VMs to the lowest common denominator so you can migrate across a wider range of hardware, then we’ll all install everything virtualised; until then you’ll have to have a reason.
Ben Armstrong agrees but he calls it something different; he’d say that virtualisation technology is a commodity. Companies pick and choose between VMware and Hyper-V on a per-project basis; just because they used VMware for the last virtualised server doesn’t mean they won’t pick Hyper-V this time if it’s a better fit. Just as they might buy Dell servers this year to go with last year’s HP kit.
That’s not a problem for Microsoft, or at least not as much of a problem as it is to VMware. If you put in VMware, you might go and put Windows Server or SQL Server or Exchange or BizTalk on top of it, and you might choose System Centre to manage it alongside your physical servers. If you choose Hyper-V (free or with Windows Server), VMware has nothing else to sell you. That’s why the rumoured VMware Linux distribution (if it’s not a red herring caused by VMware hiring more folks to work on Linux-based ESX) would make some sense (for VMware that is); you can run Linux on Hyper-V, so you might pick VMware Linux and pay for VMware Linux support. The question is: would you?
- Mary
Sunday 25 October 2009, 6:44 PM
Can cloud savings just evaporate?
We've been at the SharePoint conference this week and I was thinking about Google in the session about using the FAST search engine in SharePoint, in terms of the tweaks administrators can do to refine results and wondering if the Google search appliance offers more controls than it used to (Google's answer used to be along the lines of 'you don't need controls because it works so well' and given that the search algorithm was the secret sauce, the source stayed secret).
I've been thinking about the Sidekick data story on and off for a while too, more in terms of governance and out-sourcing accountability and SLAs than in a technology sense. I often think about cloud services in terms of the tension between lower costs and less control, but I'm not sure if the cost savings always add up. Efficiencies of scale yes, free electricity no. And then I spotted the debate in LA about whether to switch the city government to Gmail and Google Apps bringing up some really interesting points (especially at the LA Times blog).
The contract is for $7.25 million contract; that's a small proportion of the LA city IT budget, but it's not a small contract. The city had 15 proposals (the LA Times says seven of those are from Microsoft; I'm going to assume that's different proposals from Microsoft and partners across on-premise, hosted and cloud solutions with a mix of Exchange, Office and SharePoint, with different features and prices).
Some critics have wondered if the email for the LA police should be in Google servers at all, for privacy reasons. I hope LA is thinking about availability and support issues as well as security and geolocking. But the big argument is, of course, about the money.
Google told the LA Times they have a "dramatically lower cost solution" and the city's Information Technology Agency said that the Google system would save millions of dollars. But then, says the paper " a recent city analysis found that, instead of offering clear budgetary savings, installing and running Google Apps would actually exceed the cost of the current Novell system by $1.5 million over the five-year life of the contract."
To get such different figures means they're measuring different things. I keep saying most companies don't know what their IT costs them or what value it has for them. We have to get more instrumentation and better cost analysis - or working out what saves money and what costs money can cost more than you'd save by changing in the first place.
-Mary
Sunday 25 October 2009, 2:56 PM
CentOS 5.4 Released
I'm still keeping my dual-Atom CPU Multi-Boot Mini-Server up to date, so I was pleased to see the release of CentOS 5.4 a week or so ago. This is known as the Community Enterprise Operating System, and although it is based on a fresh compilation of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, it goes far beyond being just that. It includes more and better packages, improved updating and repositories, and much more. Although this is a minor release step (5.3->5.4), there are some significant changes and improvements. Check the Release Announcement for general information, and the Release Notes for a detailed list of new and updated packages.
If you want to take a look at CentOS, this release has both i386 and x86_64 LiveCD downloads. One small word of caution, though. Unlike most other distributions, you can not install CentOS from the LiveCD, for that you have to download the DVD distribution. I installed the 64-bit distribution on MMS today with no problems.
jw 25/10/2009
Tuesday 20 October 2009, 1:53 PM
Fill that power gap: batteries or flywheels?
Are flywheels better than batteries? I visited a datacentre a while back that had a flywheel to fill the gap between power outages and the diesel generator kicking in. The datacentre manager told me it made sense because batteries - the usual alternative - were expensive to maintain and to cool
"Batteries would need a chiller full time to keep them cool, which means 250kW off the top of our power usage, compromising our density proposition. Also, batteries aren't particularly green – although green is important, most customers won't pay extra for it," I was told.
Now Chloride, a battery maker - oops, a company that used to make batteries but now focuses on UPSes - tells me that this is hogwash and that if the datacentre manager had come to them he'd have found that flywheels have their own issues (of course) and that batteries hardly heat at all as they only do so when working - charging or discharging - and that most of the time they're doing neither.
Which is right? What's your take on batteries versus flywheels? (That's big lumps of rotating metal, not Wolf J. - look it up!)
Friday 16 October 2009, 9:08 AM
Microsoft App-V: Helpful Tools
I wanted to mention a rather useful tool that have recently come from Microsoft.
As quoted by one of the TechNet blogs;
"The Microsoft Installer (MSI) Utility for Microsoft Application Virtualization, a utility for SoftGrid Application Virtualization solution that bridges the gap between traditional physical control of installed applications and the new paradigm of virtual applications."
This means that you can now load MSI packages into SoftGrid environments and not have to "Sequence" or convert them to SoftGrid (SFT) packages before deployment. This would allow an organization to utilize their existing SMS environment and "dilute" their application management efforts through supporting two different application management formats.
Have a read:
http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/09/11/microsoft-unveils-plans
-for-the-msi-utility-for-microsoft-virtualization-at-vmworld.aspx
And the official source:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-11virtualization.mspx
This makes sense as the SoftGrid SFT file format was riddled with Open Source/GPL software and the compression algorithm was written by a lovely French chap who detested Microsoft - hardly the recipe for a thriving format for M$. I am not too sure that this is going to work for more difficult/complex applications. However, it may help with some of the rapid proto-typing required to get a SoftGrid (aka MAV) environment off the ground and get some applications sequenced quickly, ready for testing (i.e. thrashing).
Monday 12 October 2009, 11:18 AM
IE8: Another Application Compatibility Platform
Getting applications to work on Vista or Windows Server 2008 is not the only compatibility issue that you may encounter. One additional "platform" that you may not have considered is the security and application compatibility restrictions that have introduced as part of the update Microsoft's Internet Explorer - IE8.
These ideas got me thinking about the IE8 compatibility question(s). More specifically,
1) Have new security restrictions been introduced?
2) What features and functionality are no longer available?
3) Are there recent Microsoft updates or patches that may cause an issue with IE8?
4) Are there any new compatibility issues that are specifically relevant to Windows 7 and Server 2008?
It does not take long to work through the IE 8 release notes, the accumulated IE8 support documentation and with a little help from friends who have deployed IE8 to highlight some of the potential security and compatibility issues including;
Deprecated API's
Does you application reference any API's or functionality from these groups?
• DirectAnimation
• Channel Definition Format (CDF)
• Gopher Protocol
Deprecated Features
Does your application rely on any of the following functionality?
• XBM Image format
• Telnet Protocol
• Gopher Protocol
• SSL Version 1.x
• Scriptlet MIME Types
IE8 Signed Controls
Internet Explorer 7 allows for ActiveX controls to be signed and therefore allow for greater privileges and access to local machine file system. Some intranet environments may require that all controls are now signed. To deploy to these environments, you need to ensure all of your ActiveX controls that rely on the IE engine are signed.
IE8 Safe for Scripting Controls
Managing ActiveX controls in an secure enterprise environment is a difficult balancing act. IE8 allows for an additional level of security with the CATID_SafeForScripting and the CATID_SafeForInitializing component category registry settings. These settings allow your IE8 applications to fully use the ActiveX scripting model
IE8 ActiveX Pre-Approved CLSID
Due to the increased security restrictions available in IE8, ActiveX objects (DLL's) may not install correctly due to lack of sufficient permissions. Adding the unique identifier of an ActiveX control to the pre-approved list of ActiveX controls will allow the application component to install successfully. As recommend in Microsoft's (ActiveX Security: Improvements and Best Practices - see references) you should not employ this option if;
- Your ActiveX control was not designed to use pages served from the Internet (as opposed to your intranet)
- Your ActiveX control is downloaded to the target machine
- Your control is solely intranet based (you should use Active Directory Group Policy objects instead)
References:
Microsoft IE8 Release Notes
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/aa740486.aspx
Security and Compatibility in Internet Explorer 7
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms649488.aspx
Finding Security Compatibility Issues in Internet Explore
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250493.aspx
ActiveX Security: Improvements and Best Practices
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250471.aspx
Thursday 8 October 2009, 2:03 PM
MS and Novell: Relationship 'exceeding expectations'
Microsoft and Novell are close to completing the sales targets that formed part of their alliance, three years into the five-year deal, representatives from the companies said on Thursday.
Speaking at an IP Expo seminar in London, Novell's Microsoft alliance director Steve Harris and Microsoft's strategic partnerships chief Michael Croney said the results of the virtualisation-centric arrangement had exceeded expectations.
"Microsoft has sold $220m [£137m] worth of Suse Linux subscriptions for Novell," Croney said in the seminar, referring to the element of the Microsoft-Novell pact whereby Microsoft paid Novell $240m for subscriptions it intended to resell to its customers.
Speaking with ZDNet UK after the presentation, Croney said there was "a general feeling within Microsoft that the Microsoft-Novell alliance has produced better results than anticipated and this is reflected in the broadness of the alliance, and the increased focus on different technological components that were not anticipated at the outset". He pointed to the work on Moonlight — an open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich media technology — and directory federation as examples of this.
In August last year, Microsoft agreed to resell up to another $100m worth of Suse Linux subscriptions — it has bought already $25m worth and will continue to buy more subscriptions in $25m chunks, depending on how sales go, Croney said.
Harris said subscription sales were "more successful than [Novell] anticipated", while Croney said the extra subscriptions ordered showed "the partnership has exceeded [Microsoft's] expectations".
Asked about the impact on the Microsoft-Novell relationship of Microsoft's virtualisation interoperability validation with Red Hat, announced on Wednesday, Croney said his company was "very pleased" about the validation, but Microsoft would still recommend Suse Linux over Red Hat Enterprise Linux to its customers because of intellectual property issues.
Whereas a fundamental element of the Microsoft-Novell deal was Microsoft's agreement to not sue Novell over alleged IP infringements in Linux, Croney said "Red Hat have not tried to address the IP assurance issue at all".
Harris reacted to the Microsoft-Red Hat deal by saying it was no surprise to Novell. "No technology can be maintained exclusively by any technology company these days," he said, adding: "We have already moved on, for example to managing that technology" — a reference to Novell's release of a product that allows Microsoft's management tools to monitor Suse Linux.
Wednesday 7 October 2009, 5:40 PM
Red Hat and Microsoft support mixed virtualisation
It is now possible to deploy supported virtualisation environments that combine Red Hat Linux with Microsoft Windows Server, the two companies have announced.
Late on Wednesday, Red Hat and Microsoft said they had completed interoperability testing and validation between the two companies' virtualisation software and operating systems. They first said they planned to do so back in February.
The two firms are offering joint support for:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
- Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.
Microsoft products certified on Windows Server and Red Hat products certified on RHEL are also supported.
"Red Hat customers have the flexibility to run their applications in environments that span from bare-metal servers, to virtualised servers, to public clouds — and this additional support will broaden their deployment choices even further," Red Hat corporate deployment chief Mike Evans said in the companies' statement.
Windows Server virtualisation chief Mike Neil said in the statement that the support would let customers "confidently deploy new applications and services".
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